The Real Thucydides Trap

Lessons from history Thucydides, the ancient Greek historian, It acknowledged that ‘great-power compe- did not suffer from false modesty. His work, tition’ – in other words, vying with China The real he insisted, was intended not to win the and Russia – had become a determining praise of his contemporaries but as a ‘pos- factor in American foreign policy. session for all time’ whose lessons would What all those Chinese pronounce- Thucydides never lose their value for analysts of human ments have in mind is the thinking devel- society or military affairs. oped by Graham Allison, a Harvard profes- Nearly 25 centuries on, the great chron- sor of political science. Since 2012, he has trap icler of war between Athens, Sparta and been refining the theory that rising powers their respective empires is apparently tend to come into conflict with those whose being vindicated. strength is long established. He has dem- Greek historian is Professor Donald Kagan, the world’s onstrated how this happened in 12 out of more subtle than he best-known Thucydides scholar, has said 16 cases, including that of post-Victorian that more people are studying the Pelopon- Britain and Imperial Germany. is given credit for, nesian war between Athens and Sparta than His starting point is one short line in at any time since it concluded in 404BC. In Thucydides’ magisterial tome whose Eng- argues Bruce Clark recent years, moreover, the Greek author’s lish translation runs to nearly 200,000 name has become as firmly established in words: ‘What made the war inevitable was China’s foreign policy discourse as it was the growth of Athenian power and the fear in the liberal-arts curriculum and military which this caused in Sparta.’ science manuals of the West. But as many Greek history buffs would In at least three major speeches, Presi- insist, that sentence is hardly Thucydides dent Xi Jinping has mentioned and, albeit at his best. In fact, Professor Kagan believes with slightly diminishing confidence, re- that on this point, Thucydides is simply jected the ‘Thucydides trap’, which has wrong: Athens and Sparta could have co- come to mean the notion that conflict existed if their differences had been han- between China and the United States is dled better. inevitable. ‘There is no such thing as the Thucydides Athens rise to power trap,’ he stated firmly in Seattle in 2015. Nor does that single formula apply well to Then in January 2017, soon after Don- the Sino-American competition of today. ald Trump had been elected, President Xi It invites us to imagine the United States declared that the trap could be escaped ‘as as Sparta, the totalitarian hegemon, and long as we maintain communication and China as Athens, the cheeky upstart. But treat each other with sincerity.’ American strategists, and before them Eight months later, he gave a warning British ones, always identified their coun- that ‘we must all strive to avoid the Thucy- try with Athens, and there are good rea- dides trap’ with its false implication that sons for that. great powers are doomed to vie for global To recall the history in a nutshell: when hegemony. China, he added, ‘lacks the the fifth century BC dawned, Sparta was genes’ for such a competition. clearly the dominant power among Greek In September 2019, it was the turn of his city-states, by virtue of its formidable army, foreign minister Wang Yi to note disap- and Athens a relative minnow. In 490, the provingly that ‘some people are using every young Athenian democracy astonished the means to depict China as a major adversary, Greek world by defeating a Persian inva- marketing the prophecy that the relation- sion, without Spartan help, at Marathon. A ship is doomed to fall into the Thucydides decade later, after a crash naval construc- trap’. But the minister’s message was not tion programme, Athenian ships showed complacent; his country’s relations with their prowess at the battle of Salamis in America could either sail through ‘calm warding off a second Persian invasion, this seas’ or else cascade into ‘churning waters time in uneasy alliance with Sparta. and raging waves’ depending on how they Over the next 50 years, relations between were handled. Athens and Sparta fluctuated between If the Greek historian had erred, it was tense coexistence and outright conflict. only in seeing conflict as pre-ordained: that Athens emerged as the hub of an alliance was the Chinese official’s implication. of more than 150 small islands and cities By this time, there had been a corre- sponding shift in American geopoliti- Thucydides, the Athenian historian whose cal discourse, at least since the national warning about demagogues taking control of defence strategy unveiled in January 2018. democratic institutions is still relevant today 40 | the world today | december 2019 & january 2020 Lessons from history GETTY IMAGES the world today | december 2019 & january 2020 | 41 Lessons from history THE PRINT COLLECTION VIA GETTY VIA IMAGES COLLECTION PRINT THE Democracy awry: Athenian troops retreat from Syracuse in 415BC which supposedly had the common pur- over each other, we do not feel called upon pose of deterring and punishing Persia but to be angry with our neighbour for doing ‘The comparison in fact served as an instrument of Athenian what he likes … but all this ease in our pri- power. vate relations does not make us indifferent between Athens It is easy to see why the masters of Cold- to the law as citizens.’ and Nato is not War America, like those of Victorian Brit- In contrast to its totalitarian enemies, ain, instinctively compared themselves Pericles says, Athens relished the exchange entirely flattering to with Athens, the jewel in the crown of clas- of goods, people and ideas with other parts sical Greece, and the source of its greatest of the world. Its brand of liberty was an in- the latter. In some cultural products, from drama to sculpture. spiration to its admirers and a provocation They saw in Athens a society that was in- to its foes. The speech writers of George ways the Athenian tellectually curious, commercially vibrant W Bush were consciously or unconsciously and commendably confident of its right invoking Thucydides when the president empire was more to project power over a wide swath of the declared, in the aftermath of the 9/11 ter- known world. They liked the fact that Ath- ror attacks, that America’s enemies ‘hate comparable to ens was law-governed and democratic in its our freedoms’. the Warsaw Pact, domestic affairs but prepared to act ruth- This subliminally Periclean rhetoric goes lessly in defence of its external interests. back to the early years of the Cold War, or even the Whatever the reality, the self-image of when American strategists were fascinated Athens as ‘mother of the free’ is brilliantly by the parallels between their own bipolar Soviet Union’ elaborated in the funeral oration which world and the stand-off between Athens, Thucydides ascribes to Pericles. Sparta and their respective empires dur- ‘Far from exercising a jealous surveillance ing the 50 years between Salamis and the 42 | the world today | december 2019 & january 2020 Lessons from history inter-Greek war. George Marshall, the woven that his modern interpreters are American secretary of state, said in 1947 ‘Nato sees the divided over whether he was, ultimately, an that he doubted whether it was possible to admirer or a critic of democracy. In fact, he think ‘with full wisdom’ about the world relationship between addresses the question from two diametri- unless one made a decent study of Thucy- strong defence and cally opposing angles, both of which have dides. Five years later, as Nato was taking contemporary resonance. shape, another American diplomat, Louis robust democracy as In describing the first ten years of the Halle, made the comparison more explicit: inter-Greek war (431-421BC), he presents ‘Our country finds herself, like Athens a virtuous circle’ Athens as a place where democracy and after the Peloponnesian wars, called on to the city itself proved astonishingly resil- assume the leadership of the free world …’ the Athenians voted to send a limited force ient in the face of disasters, including a Every well-educated listener knew what of ten triremes, with instructions only to plague which claimed the lives of perhaps he meant, except that it would have made intervene if the island looked in danger of a third of the population. Athens was able to more sense to speak of Athens before those being overwhelmed. recover and fight Sparta to a draw, and its hostilities. In modern terms, this is the equivalent endurance apparently reflected what mod- As a way of understanding any situation of America offering ‘non-lethal assistance’ ern political scientists call the democratic where two or more constellations of states to Ukraine in the hope of deterring, but not advantage: the fact that open societies, are in chronic competition, the writing of enraging, the Russians. even in adversity, can foster innovative Thucydides certainly offers some illumina- Time and again, the strategists of Ath- thinking, meritocracy and risk-taking. To tion. Still, the comparison between Ath- ens and Sparta faced local skirmishes which that extent, Nato’s new philosophy gets ens and Nato is not entirely flattering to could easily develop into a generalized con- a boost. the latter. In some ways, the Athenian em- flict. The modern question of how much But in his incomplete decription of the pire was more comparable to the Warsaw help to give ‘our son of a bitch’ against ‘their final phase of the war, Thucydides paints Pact, or even the Soviet Union, in the way it son of a bitch’ was very familiar to ancient a much darker picture.

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